Conflagration (13 page)

New arrivals brought fresh names to add to the roll call of the lost, and these were met by dour stares, groans, and curses, and the mood grew increasing morose and drunk. News came that an entire gun crew had been wiped out by a Mosul direct hit, one of the first guns into the valley, one of those who had pounded the western ridge. As the names of the dead were repeated, the artillery colonel who had been their commander rose to his feet, and, with great deliberation and precision, hurled an almost full bottle of good Norse scotch, from his private store, hard at the nearest support pole with enough force to smash it. Then he took a deep breath and, with a strained and shaking control, requested a replacement from the mess orderly. “I seem to have destroyed the last in a fit of rage, I believe, at the random nature of death.”

An RAAC flying officer, an observer from one of the Odins, walked in and was immediately barraged with questions. “How now, young Flying Officer? What of the enemy?”

“What are the Mosul reinforcements doing? Are they still coming on?”

The flying officer dropped into a chair at an empty table, threw down his helmet, goggles, and gloves. He unstrapped his sidearm and laid it beside them, holding up a hand as if to ward off all the impatient demands for news. “A moment, gentleman.” He turned to the orderly. “A whiskey, if you please, Jeeves.”

The glass was placed in front of him and the flying officer drank it down in one. “You had better give me another.”

This was too much for a stout, red-faced infantry major. “Damn it, man. Don’t tease us like some coy fucking virgin. Are the Mosul coming or not? Will we have to go through the whole bloody business again in the morning?”

A certain resentfulness existed between the infantry and the airmen. The infantry viewed the Air Corps as privileged glamour boys who sailed way above the muck and bullets, while the infantry bled and died, and fought the war the hard way. For their part, the RAAC considered the very act of taking a piece of imperfect machinery thousands of feet into the air to be more than enough proof of their courage and endurance, let alone swooping low over the Mosul lines to drop their bombs or gather information on enemy positions. As the orderly poured the airman his second drink, he looked slowly round at the anxious, assembled faces and smiled. “It seems to be good news, my friends.”

“So tell us.”

“The relief column has stopped. They’ve been halted since before sunset. They could have just stopped for the night, but they could be stopped in preparation to get the fuck out of Virginia. It’s impossible to tell. All I know was that whoever was leading the column was in no hurry to bail out Faysid Ab Balsol. They weren’t exactly marching to the sound of his guns. Quite the reverse. As soon as Balsol made his stand, they noticeably slowed down.”

The news that the relief column was not coming at them in double time caused a measure of relief and orders for fresh drinks, but the mention of Faysid Ab Balsol prompted the flying officer to question to the room. “What became of that bastard?”

“What bastard?”

“Faysid Ab fucking Balsol. What happened to him after he offered his sword to Dunbar?”

A youthful lieutenant who had lost most of his platoon in the first advance snorted angrily. “He’s probably hung up by his thumbs someplace, before they hang him properly.”

But he was corrected by a more experienced, long-serving captain of cavalry. “Quite the reverse, dear boy. He is most likely being formally wined and dined by the generals.”

The young lieutenant was shocked. “I don’t understand.”

“They don’t hang or torture supreme commanders, lad. It would set a dangerous precedent.” The cynical observation elicited a fresh snippet of news from another newcomer. “On the subject of hanging and torturing, the intelligence boys have a dragnet out for surviving Zhaithan. Seems like they’ve been trying to slip away disguised as Mosul grunts.”

One bit of scuttlebutt coaxed out another. “I heard some irregulars brought a bunch of Zhaithan in a while ago, and handed them over to Slide.”

This produced some knowing and decidedly evil smiles. “Slide will know what to do with the Zhaithan. At least Hassan’s butcher boys won’t be dining with any generals.”

CORDELIA

The prisoner sat on a straight-backed folding chair with his hands lashed behind his back. When Slide had roused Cordelia, he had told her that the man “believes that he’ll be tortured, and I’ve done nothing to set him straight.” Now Slide walked round him with the studied deliberation of the practiced interrogator. “I’ll speak very slowly so I don’t have to repeat myself. I am not of this world, Zhaithan, and if I feel like it, I can fuse your fucking cortex, and have you contorting on the floor until your spine snaps. You want to put it to the test?”

The prisoner’s eye was blackened and his lip was cut. He had been captured by irregular guerrillas, hard men with flowing hair and necklaces of bear teeth. He’d been trying to slip away, disguised in the greatcoat of an infantry private, but he had made the mistake of hanging on to his expensive, handmade Krupp sidearm, and it had betrayed him. The guerrillas had slapped him around for a while, as punishment for his deceit and noncooperation, but had held off from shooting him out of hand. Since the invasion, the guerrillas had lost a lot of comrades to the gallows and torture chambers of the Zhaithan and the Mosul Ministry of Virtue, and no one would have blamed them if they had exacted a measure of swift revenge, but these mountain men knew enough to realize that a high-placed Zhaithan could provide a wealth of information if a way could be found to pry it out of him. Thus they had beat the man a little more, and then brought him to Yancey Slide, working on the principle that, if anyone could crack a Zhaithan, it was Slide.

Cordelia was not quite sure why Slide had decided to rouse her from her sleep to come and look at this prisoner. She had been deep asleep. Her body was bruised and aching after her fall from the gelding, and she was exhausted from the turmoil of the day. Her first reaction on being shaken awake was a string of obscenities. Her second was to demand to know what the hell was going on. Slide had handed her his flask.

“We have a prisoner. A high Zhaithan.”

The information and the offer of a drink had cut through Cordelia’s bleary fury. She took a pull from the flask and coughed. “We do?”

“It has fallen to me to interrogate him. Dunbar thinks that I might be able to wring some nuggets of truth out of him.”

Cordelia took a second drink. The liquor tasted strange, probably some outlandish concoction of Slide’s. “And where do I come into this wringing?”

“I want you to put on a fresh uniform and come with me.”

“You want me to help you interrogate this bastard?”

Slide produced a flame from the tip of his index finger and lit a cheroot. “I suspect you may have a talent for extracting truth.”

Cordelia had seen the flaming finger trick too many times before to be impressed. She also wasn’t sure how she felt about his last statement, but she climbed stiffly from her bed, crossed the tent to the washstand. Slide sat down on her vacated bed with the cheroot in the corner of his mouth, and watched as she splashed water on her face. She had no problem being naked in front of Slide. He wasn’t human, so it didn’t count. “How highly placed?”

“What?”

“This Zhaithan, how highly placed?”

“He’s a Fourth Adept.”

“How do you know that?”

“By the tattoos just under his armpit. They all have them, and they’re updated every time they’re promoted. He could well have been one of Balsol’s top Zhaithan.”

“In that case, he won’t crack easily.”

“That’s why I need your help. You can sniff the metaphysics coming off him.”

Slide could put things oddly, but Cordelia always understood, as she did when he continued. “I’m fairly sure you won’t be impeded by any moral complexities.”

“You mean you won’t hear me complain that doing unto the Zhaithan as they’d do unto others would make us as bad as they are?”

“Something of that order.”

“Unlike my three companions, who still retain a few scruples?”

“Exactly. So make yourself as formidable as you can. We are playing the Zhaithan at his own game.”

She selected a crisp new riding habit and dressed quickly. After she had pulled on her boots, Slide nodded approvingly, and offered a final suggestion. “Wear your riding gloves, and bring your crop.”

Cordelia could feel herself warming to this new and unexpected task. She was far from sure that it was a healthy warmth, but she went with it. If nothing else, being present at an interrogation would be a kind of payback for what she had suffered at the hands of Her Grand Eminence Jeakqual-Ahrach. “I have the perfect thing.”

She had put on her blue glasses, even though it was dark, and Slide had nodded.

The night seemed less about blue sunglasses once Slide had led her into the isolated tent where the Zhaithan was tied to the straight-backed folding chair. The bound prisoner’s bruised face was dirty and glistened with sweat, his eyes were bloodshot. He was stripped to the waist and, in addition to his face, his body showed marks of where he had been punched and kicked immediately after his capture. Two of his captors stood on either side of him. The irregulars were big, weatherbeaten mountain men in boots and buckskins, with aborigine tattoos, and rifles held in the crooks of their arms. They looked eager to use the butts of those rifles on the Zhaithan, but Slide dismissed them. “I think Lady Blakeney and I can take it from here.”

“You cutting us out of the fun, Yancey?”

“Go get yourselves drunk, boys, and maybe I’ll give him to you later if he’s difficult.”

For a long minute after the mountain men exited the tent, Slide simply stared at the Zhaithan. Somewhere across the camp, a lone voice was singing.

In the valley below, lads

In the valley below

I’ll never be leaving,

The valley below.

“Understand me, Zhaithan, I can fuse your cortex and have you contorting on the floor.”

A spotlight, hooked up to an outside generator, had been placed over the seated prisoner, positioned to cause him the optimum discomfort. The Zhaithan slowly raised his head and, squinting against the harsh electric glare, looked first at Cordelia, and then at Slide. “This is a charade. You won’t harm me.”

During this opening exchange, Cordelia had stood stiffly in the shadows, unsure as to what to do. She experimentally flexed her crop, and discovered that she liked the feeling. The smoke of Slide’s cheroot drifted into the cone of light, and Cordelia decided to join the drama. She took a measured step forward. “You don’t think so?”

“Your monarch, your Carlyle, issued an edict. What was it he said?
‘We treat our captured opponent with humanity, otherwise we are no better than him.’
”

“You are very well informed.”

The prisoner smiled unpleasantly. “We have agents all through your capital.”

Cordelia tapped her crop on her gloved palm. “Then, by the time we’ve finished, I guarantee you will have told the name of every last one of them.”

“You are wasting your time with this posturing.”

“Perhaps, but let’s start with your name.”

The Zhaithan had no trouble with that. “Borat Omar.”

“And what is your rank, Borat Omar?”

“Fourth Adept.”

“What was your function in Faysid Ab Balsol’s command?”

“I’m not required to tell you that. Name and rank is all you’ll get from me.”

Slide sighed. “Borat Omar, I think I should tell you something. My name is Yancey Slide, I have no rank, and, as I already told you, I am not of this world. Some would call me a demon out of the most evil legends, and you should know I pay little heed to the dictates of any human monarch. Does the name Slide mean anything to you, Borat Omar?”

Borat Omar betrayed himself with the just the slightest flicker of fear, but then he set his jaw and made his face expressionless. “My name is Borat Omar, and my rank is…”

The prisoner suddenly gasped, his spine stiffened and then his body twisted, almost upsetting the chair. At the same time, Cordelia experienced what she could only describe as a vision. It only lasted for a split second, but, in that brief instant, she saw them with great clarity. A boy and a girl, but otherwise identical; albino twins with an apparent age of eight or nine years, who stared at her with wide-eyed, knowing expressions that seemed beyond their years. Cordelia did her best to deal with the glimpse without betraying herself to the bound Zhaithan. Slide had said sniff the metaphysics, but this was more than a mere whiff of the paranormal. The Zhaithan sagged forward in the chair, almost toppling, seemingly in a swoon. She took a couple of steps back, out of the prisoner’s hearing and, when Slide joined her, she whispered urgently. “What the hell did you do?”

Slide dragged deeply on his cheroot. “I just ruffled the surface of his mind a little. A taste of what he could expect if he continued to resist me.”

“Your ruffling cut loose a full-flown vision.”

“A vision of what?”

“The white twins we’ve all been dreaming about.”

Slide’s eyes narrowed, and he glanced thoughtfully at the captive Zhaithan. “And what did these twins look like?”

Cordelia shook her head. “It was very fast. I saw two children, a boy and a girl, identical twins with white hair, but then they were gone.”

“So we have to find out what the subject of your dreams is doing in the mind of Borat Omar?”

Cordelia stared thoughtfully at the prisoner who still hung limp, supported by his bonds. “Can I take a crack at him?”

Slide extended the hand of interrogator generosity. “Be my guest.”

Cordelia again approached the prisoner. “Do we have your attention now?”

The Zhaithan made no move, remaining bent forward, apparently staring at the ground. Cordelia placed the tip of her riding crop under his chin, and raised his head. “I asked if we had your attention.”